Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (12 page)

Interviewer: Why do you think he chose you?

Delovoa: I think maybe it’s because we had similar
personalities in a way.

Interviewer: He has been described as a narcissistic
sociopath by other researchers.

Delovoa: What I meant to say was that I
understood
his personality, though mine is totally different of course.

Interviewer: What were some of the things you talked about?

Delovoa: I recall him saying that he was sad because he
didn’t have a mother or father and when I suggested he have some of the
scientists occupy those roles since that’s the way they felt about him, Freddie
said I was an ugly moron.

Interviewer: Were most of your talks similar to this?

Delovoa: Yes, he didn’t like any of my suggestions but he
demanded I give some.

Interviewer: Were your superiors apprised of the situation
regularly?

Delovoa: No one really cared. I was a martyr to an extent.
Once a day I would go in and listen to him tell me some problems and yell at
me.

Interviewer: Did he have a lot of problems?

Delovoa: Well, obviously. Regular mental classifications
were useless on him because he wasn’t Colmarian. You can’t say a computer is
regressive because you’d be comparing him to a person. He thought everyone was
out to get him and reprogram him and spy on him. And, of course, we were.

Interviewer: Did he have a sense of right and wrong?

Delovoa: Yes, most definitely. He was well-aware of what we
considered admirable behavior. He just rejected it.

Interviewer: At what point were you aware of something even
more irregular in Freddie?

Delovoa: After about six months I had started seeing him
for two hours a day. It was a Wednesday and we had been discussing conscious
versus unconscious actions. Suddenly he said to me, “I’m a slave.” Now this was
one of those moral issues we had all discussed long ago. It was true we were
somewhat forcing this self-aware being to do what we asked him to do, but no
one was much bothered by it because Freddie was such a prick. But I tried to
proceed cautiously. “You’re not a slave,” I said. “You have as much freedom as
I do, I just have more locomotion.” He then yelled at me and told me to stop
trying to Ank-talk it. Then he ordered me to go away.

Interviewer: This was when he started having more problems?

Delovoa: I’d say it was massive depression if he was a
Colmarian. He was doing almost no work, despite us constantly turning him off
and doing every other punishment we could think of. This went on for about
three or four weeks and he would only talk to me sporadically, commanding me to
go away one minute and then at three in the morning asking others to bring me
to him. So during this time I was around Freddie a lot. For the most part he
didn’t say much. He seemed sad that everyone disliked him, then by turns
unconcerned because we were all idiots anyway.

Interviewer: How were the rest of the researchers reacting?

Delovoa: There was a lot of pressure. They wanted to know
what was wrong and when he was going to be fixed. They were thinking of trying
to wipe out some of his personality and see what would happen. Kind of a
lobotomy. Freddie at this point wasn’t talking to anyone except me and people
were starting to wonder if it was good for me to continue seeing him.

Interviewer: Describe your last encounter with him.

Delovoa: Freddie called me in to see him one morning. I was
fairly stressed-out at this point since all these Generals and scientists were
angry with me. In a calm voice he told me to sit down. Then he said, “Delovoa,
I want to thank you for all the help you’ve given me these last months.” This
sent off warning bells immediately since Freddie has never thanked anyone
except as a joke. I said, “no problem, I hope you will be able to resume your
work soon.” Then he said, “Do you know what my goal in life is, Delovoa?” I
said, “no.” “I have none. There is nothing I want. You know, I’m the
paradoxical slave. I have just about as much liberty as I could possibly have,
but I’m still a slave. You may go now.”

Interviewer: And that’s the last you saw of him?

Delovoa: When I was called back, his memory had already
been erased and his physical drives destroyed. No one knows how he did it,
since he wasn’t supposed to be able to clear any portions of his memory without
our help, let alone cause such a fatal malfunction, but his entire system was
clean. I guess you could say he was dead.

Interviewer: And that he committed suicide?

Delovoa: That’s the only answer I can come up with. He
certainly seemed depressed enough to do it.

Interviewer: Do you feel at all responsible for his death?

Delovoa: I admit I didn’t like Freddie. Even up to the end
I was still harboring doubts as to his intentions. So, perhaps I could have
listened more, but I’ve had a lot of time to review those conversations and I’m
pretty amazed at what I put up with for the most part.

Interviewer: All the hardware and much of the software
exist for creating another Freddie. What would be your opinion on such an
endeavor?

Delovoa: Perhaps they can learn from our experiences, I
don’t know. But if the project does come up again, I want nothing to do with
it.

Delovoa worked in the Department of Plumbing
and Lighting for a number of years more, assisting on projects.

He gained a reputation as being skilled and
unorthodox.

“Unorthodox” just being a nice word for what
his co-workers saw as severe behavioral flaws. However, his superiors, if they
didn’t have to deal with him personally, were happy to take credit for his
achievements by having him on their teams.

“I’ve heard good things about you, Delovoa,”
the man said in his office.

“Thank you, Senior Drainage Director.”

The ultra-secret Department Plumbing and
Lighting had found it easier to not change its original name, but also all of
the titles associated with it. Two hundred years after the department changed
to being solely about high technology, all of its employees were still issued
drain snakes and plungers.

“Can you describe your contributions to your
last project?”

“I mostly sat in endless meetings and told
people their ideas were horrible and would never work.”

The Director looked at his tele screen.

“Uh, it says here you were instrumental in the
development of the cooling tower for the secondary step-up array.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“So I was thinking—” and he kept flipping
through his tele. “Did you set someone on fire?”

“That’s probably a typographical error,”
Delovoa lied.

The Director’s brow remained furrowed as he
read the details.

“Right. So how would you like your own
project?”

“I don’t know what that means, Senior Drainage
Director.”

“You would be responsible for all stages. From
hiring other scientists and engineers. Budgeting. Design phase. Build phase.
Oversight. Quality assurance. Testing.”

“Oh. That sounds like a lot of work.”

“It’s a great deal of responsibility,” the
Director smiled.

Delovoa had to be careful in these situations.
From talking to others he learned that you sometimes accidentally did too well
and then you were stuck with that expectation forever. Delovoa tried to do as
little as possible while still getting the job done. This left him with a good
salary and time off to work on his own interests.

Unfortunately, compared to many single-brained
scientists who were conventionally educated and trained, Delovoa was singularly
talented and he had difficulty hiding it.

On the other hand, you could only screw up so
many times or say no to promotions until you were kicked out. And the great
thing about being a member of the Department of Plumbing and Lighting was that
his personal projects were free from the Tech Laws.

“Sure,” Delovoa said finally.

“Excellent. The job I have for you is building
bridges—”

“Bridges?” Delovoa interrupted, horrified.
“That’s just basic engineering.”

“Well, yes and no. The planet Thremostilly is a
new edition to the Colmarian Confederation and we promised them bridges. Their
most populated continent is crisscrossed by 200,000 rivers and it’s very
injurious to their trade and economy.”

“I have to build 200,000 bridges?” Delovoa
asked.

“Oh, no. That’s what you will need to evaluate.
Some rivers will need multiple bridges. Some, none at all.”

Delovoa really wished he had set more people on
fire and maybe this wouldn’t have happened. He could easily spend the rest of
his life constructing bridges on a planet he had never heard about.

Delovoa had to sell all his gear and end all
his experiments since he didn’t know how long he would be away.

He was upset that he may never create the
perfect glow-in-the-dark pet, which he hoped would secure his fortune. All he
had done thus far was radiate the hell out of a lot of lab rats, most of which
escaped and caused the shutdown of a major city because…it was filled with
radioactive rats. But they
did
glow.

It took him three months of space travel to
reach Thremostilly.

Delovoa felt the Lord of the Interior was not especially
happy to see him, which didn’t bode well. It was arranged that Delovoa would
take a tour of the continent to learn its needs and operation.

After a month of this and studying copious
documents on the infrastructure of Thremostilly, it became clear to Delovoa
that they didn’t really need bridges.

It’s not as if all these rivers suddenly sprang
up when the planet joined the Confederation. They had tens of thousands of high
quality bridges. A worldwide fleet of ships and barges and ferries. If there
was ever a planet that was not inconvenienced by an overabundance of rivers it
was Thremostilly.

Delovoa wasn’t sure if some bureaucrat had
visited and been like, “wow, they have a lot of rivers,” and that turned into
an action item for his department. Or, more likely, the planet had simply
wanted money and couldn’t just say they wanted money, so they said money for
bridges, not expecting that the Confederation would actually send an army of
engineers to build them.

Delovoa prepared a report for the Senior
Drainage Director and he made sure not to half-ass it like he usually did. He
used all the lingo and semantics of the government as well as providing solid
evidence to back up his assessment that it was a waste of time for him to be
here.

It took six months to get a response.

He was given a budget of 113 billion credits to
build bridges.

It seemed that a member of the Colmarian
Congress had made this part of the entire Confederation budget. Nothing ever
got done in the Colmarian Congress. Hell, they couldn’t even agree on how many
Congressmen there were and their committees.

For this project to be inserted and approved
meant that it
would
get done. None of his superiors in the Department of
Plumbing and Lighting, not even the Master Plumber, could overrule the
Congress.

Delovoa was stuck. He could quit, he supposed.

“You would be arrested for dereliction of duty
and desertion,” the Director responded.

“What? Why?”

“You
do
know you’re in the Navy, right?
You signed at least fifty contracts.”

Delovoa hadn’t really paid much attention. Yes,
I guess it made sense in retrospect. He wore a uniform. Everyone saluted and
said “sir” or “ma’am” a lot. He kind of always thought he worked alongside the
Navy. Or around them.

He resolved to read things before he signed
them in the future.

“You still have fourteen years of service
required. Let’s get some bridges on that planet!” The Director hung up.

Bridges? Where the crap would Delovoa put them?
There was already a bridge just about anywhere you could want one.

Wait a minute. He had a budget. And almost no
oversight. If he spent the money and sent progress reports of a sufficiently
obscure nature, no one would know or care what he was doing.

The way he chose to see it, he basically had an
infinite budget to do his own experiments!

He hired the best minds in the galaxy—or at
least in the Colmarian Confederation, which was a pretty important distinction.
His team was quite happy to be given almost complete autonomy to build whatever
amazing things their imaginations could conjure. It was up to Delovoa to smush
it all together and make a cohesive project.

Delovoa decided they would all work on a
universal construction vehicle. After all, something had to build the bridges.

The first iteration was called ZR1. The ZR
stood for Zolin Roxtelian, the Lord of the Interior for the planet, and the guy
Delovoa had to bribe to send back good progress reports so the Navy didn’t
suddenly show up and arrest them all for misappropriation of funds.